Raycast opened Glaze, its Mac-focused vibe-coding app, to all users last week, priced at $20 a month for a Pro tier that ships 200 credits monthly. The launch — first announced in March 2026 and rolled out via invitations in June — pushes the emerging category of AI-assisted app building out of the developer terminal and onto ordinary desktops. A free tier includes a one-time credit bundle sufficient to build one or two apps.
Where general-purpose coding agents like Claude Code assume the user is comfortable in a terminal, Glaze starts every project from a working Mac app template. The app compiles and installs builds automatically, calls image-generation models natively, and lets users edit apps while they're running — including drawing a circle around a UI element to tell the coding agent what to change. Users can publish creations to a shared Glaze store or browse others' apps for inspiration.
The category is crowded but still young. Wabi, founded by Eugenia Kuyda, targets mobile app creation with a similar consumer-friendly frame. Raycast's advantage is distribution: its launcher app is already installed on the machines of the developers and power users most likely to try personal software. Featured apps in the Glaze store so far include a PDF reader, a subscription tracker, and a Claude usage monitor — utility software that reflects an audience of technically-inclined but not necessarily technical users.
Key facts
- 01Raycast opened Glaze, its Mac-focused vibe-coding app, to all users last week after a March 2026 announcement and a June invite wave.
- 02Glaze Pro costs $20 a month and includes 200 credits monthly, with a free tier offering a one-time bundle sufficient for one or two apps.
- 03Glaze competes with Wabi, founded by Eugenia Kuyda, which targets mobile app creation rather than desktop.
- 04Casey Newton built a Platformer research app running semantic search over six years of archives in about a day using the Anthropic API.
- 05Glaze ships a working Mac app template, native image generation, and live in-app editing — features Claude Code lacks.
Platformer's Casey Newton, writing in a first-month review, built three Mac apps with Glaze. The most useful is a personal research assistant over Platformer's six-year archive, complete with topic chips, a feed of the 10 most recent columns, and randomly surfaced quotes from prior coverage. It runs semantic queries via the Anthropic API and replaces a friction-heavy workflow that previously required launching a terminal and invoking Claude Code with a skill.
Newton estimates the Platformer app took about a day to build. A previous version, built with Claude Code, could run the same queries but lived behind command-line friction that suppressed daily use.
“It's a cheap, elegant research assistant that no one else would ever have built for me”— Casey Newton, Platformer founder
The other two apps are less serious. One is a Nightwing-themed to-do list — Newton's aesthetic-driven rebuild of a genre where Todoist has arguably been solved for years — that generates a comic-book-styled image for each task and plays boom-and-pow animations on completion. The third, called Source Code, is a half-finished contacts app that merges phone contacts and LinkedIn data into a locally stored, CRM-like network graph.
Personal software has been an unrealized promise of every prior developer-tools generation. Spreadsheets, HyperCard, no-code app builders, low-code SaaS platforms — each waved at a future where users bent software to their exact needs rather than the reverse. What Glaze and its peers add is a natural-language authoring surface that non-programmers can actually drive to completion, plus a native call graph to image and text models that would have cost thousands of dollars in engineering to wire up in prior generations.
“The new vibe-coding tools promise a world where whatever sucks about the software you use can be changed — instantly.”— Casey Newton, Platformer founder
The economics are the interesting question. At $20 a month with 200 credits, Glaze Pro is priced roughly in line with a single frontier model subscription. The company presumably passes through inference costs on Anthropic-family models, meaning gross margin on power users is thin. If personal-software creation stays hobbyist — one Nightwing to-do app per user, forgotten in a month — the credit refill rate will not sustain the tier. If it becomes durable, and users start building the CRM-adjacent tools Newton is prototyping, the credit model will need to scale.
The copyright question is unresolved and awkward. Newton acknowledges the Nightwing app generates images of a DC Comics character on demand, which he describes as almost certainly a copyright violation and an indictment of the underlying model's safety guardrails. The same criticism applies to every general-purpose image model shipping to consumers today, but Glaze's app-store distribution surface makes the exposure more visible than a single chat session. Raycast will eventually have to answer for what gets published to the store.
There's also a durability question that vibe-coding advocates tend to underplay. A hand-built Mac app that took a day to make will also take a day to break when the underlying model changes, an API shifts, or macOS updates. Personal software has historically been undermaintained software. Whether Glaze's users treat their apps as disposable — rebuilding when broken — or expect them to survive multiple years will shape which of these tools survives the next round of platform shifts.
The strategic read for the AI market is that the app layer is finally showing signs of moving. For two years the frontier labs have shipped better models into the same three or four consumer surfaces — chat, code editors, image generators. Glaze and Wabi represent the first credible attempts to let users define their own surface, one app at a time. If the SaaS-pocalypse Newton hints at ever arrives, it will look less like a single killer app and more like a long tail of ten-million-user categories collapsing into ten-million single-user apps. Raycast is betting it can be the store that hosts them.
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